


cut out in little stars

by gizkas



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: AU Prequel to the Movie, Child Soldiers, F/M, Fake Marriage, Jyn never left Saw's cadre, darker themes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-11
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-16 17:50:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9283262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gizkas/pseuds/gizkas
Summary: Stranded on an Imperial-controlled Coruscant while running a mission for Saw, Jyn finds herself at the mercy of Rebel Intelligence Agent Cassian Andor.





	

**Author's Note:**

> so i was deciding between the prompts "Jyn never left Saw's cadre" and "Fake Relationship" and then someone prompted me "Fake Relationship with Jyn who has never left Saw's cadre" and here we are. Serves as a prequel to the events of the movie, estimating four chapters but that might change. 
> 
> Maia, Codo, Staven, and Tiaba are based on characters Jyn mentions in the novelization.

 

She doesn’t like caves.

 

Saw’s hand is a comforting weight in between her shoulder blades. Jyn lets it guide her forward, her eyes not straying far from the skulls that are embedded in the walls. The air is dry and thin, but has that same smell that reminds her of the hatch. Stale, like new air hasn’t been able to come in a while.

 

“Don’t be afraid, child,” Saw instructs her. He, of course, notices how her small head is trained on the bones. “Be brave like your mother.”

 

Jyn doesn’t want to cry anymore, so she just tucks her lower lip behind her front teeth. She’s learned already that if she bites down hard enough it keeps her chin from quivering. Up ahead, she hears noises in the dark. They’re not angry noises, or sad noises. There’s the sound of dice rolling, of happy conversation, and of people cheering. As they turn the corner together, a warm, orange light spills into the walkway from a room up ahead. It catches on the skulls, making their holes where eyes should be seem less deeper and darker.

 

“Am I staying here?” She asks finally. Her arms are still firmly wrapped around her stomach.

 

Saw is quiet for a long time. “You must be hungry.”

 

Jyn nods. He steers her around a final corner, and Jyn takes in a large, domed room. Cots line the walls instead of skulls, stacked up on top of one another. There’s cook stations, a few attended. The rest of the people in the room are gathered around tables--it looks like there’s games going on and people are laughing, clapping each other on the back. Jyn notices that she’s not the only person here who’s not a grown-up -- at another table there sits children her age and even younger, playing with toys.

 

“Sit,” Saw instructs calmly, his hand giving her a final light push toward the table with the children. Jyn glances back over her shoulder and Saw looks down at her. With what looks like effort, he gives her a gentle smile. “That woman is Tiaba,” he instructs, pointing at a chalk-skinned woman by one of the cooking stations. “Ask her for food when you want.”

 

He gives her a final clap on her shoulder, and his eyes narrow in a brief expression before he turns. Jyn watches as he leaves without joining in on any of the games.

 

With nothing else to do, Jyn takes a hesitant step toward the table. One of the children, a girl her age with wild hair smiles at her. 

 

“I’m Maia!” She greets. “Are you here now?”

 

Jyn nods, and takes a seat at the table. Across from her, there’s a boy who looks a little older than them. He doesn’t look up from the toys he’s playing with.

 

“Here, you can start with an easy one,” Maia instructs, reaching across Jyn, who leans back. Maia then drops two wires in front of Jyn, the ends of each have been stripped of casing to only show the metal strings underneath.

 

“I’ll show you.” Maia pinches the two metal parts, twists them. “It’s like making a bracelet- you go up like that, and then…” She lays them flat against the rest of the right-sided wire. “You put it here and tape. You try!”

 

Jyn finds another pair, repeats it with only a little hesitancy. 

 

“And then we put one of them on this thing.” Maia grabs a pair of old pliers, strips the end of the right wire so there’s only the strings again, and reaches for a black box. She fidgets for a second before clipping it to something. “Then give it to Codo, and he’ll finish.”

 

The boy across from them lets out a little puff of air. In his hands is a small plasma torch. Jyn stares at it for a while-- she was not allowed near those.

 

“Think you can do that?” Maia asks.

 

Jyn looks at what’s in front of her. Spools of wire, some pliers. Those black boxes, toggle switches, clips. Little, battered multi-tools. 

 

She grabs another bit of wire, and nods.

 

\--

 

Jyn is ten when she starts hand-to-hand training. Her instructor, when Saw’s pulled away by something else, is a man named Staven. He’s missing three fingers on one of his hands and has a deep scar down his jaw--like someone was aiming for his throat and barely missed. But those things are secondary to what Jyn remembers about him. 

 

Jyn remembers that he laughs with all of his belly. That he lets her hear the dirty jokes of the adults’ table but irritatingly doesn’t explain them. That he sneaks her and Maia cups of fermented bantha milk and ruffles their hair.

 

Staven teaches Jyn where to hit someone in order to kill them with a truncheon. How to do it with the heel of her small hand in case her weapon’s taken from her.

 

\--

 

Saw teaches her about blasters and weapons. He takes her down to the lower levels of the catacombs, where there’s crude targets arranged on a far wall. They cover the skeletons which are embedded in the walls, some of them already missing ribs, shoulders, and parts of their skulls. 

 

“Remember where I told you to aim?” He asks, the two of them laying on their bellies a few meters away. 

 

Jyn nods. Her finger hovers around the trigger. A little lower than what she wants to hit, that was the rule. She aims for the furthest skeleton’s throat.

 

“Other hand,” he reminds.

 

Jyn brings her other hand underneath the one that’s trying to stabilize the blaster. It helps support it, evens out the grip. 

 

Saw gives her position a once over, then nods his approval. “Go.”

 

Jyn shoots three times. The first goes too wide, sending up a puff of dirt when it connects with the wall. The next punctures through the skeleton’s collar bone. The final shot takes out the top-right corner of the skull, caving it in.

 

He gives a small grunt of pride. “Keep practicing.”

 

Jyn smiles up at him. He cracks a slow smile in return.

 

“You’ve lost one of your front teeth.”

 

“Staven lost one too. And his won’t come back like mine.”

 

Saw laughs, dry like the stale air of the catacombs.

 

\--

 

She doesn’t go out into the Holy City often, only when Saw needs her to go and run messages. One of which is tucked into the palm of her glove, a small datachip no bigger than the nail of her pinkie. At twelve, Jyn doesn’t need to question what Saw asks her to do. She trusts him, as much as someone like her can trust. 

 

“I’m jealous,” Maia pouts that night at dinner. Her fingers absently pick at the synthbread in front of her. “I want to go to the market again.”

 

Jyn dumps out the package of powder over the bowl of water. Swirls it with her finger. She watches, impassively, as it absorbs the liquid and forms a puff of green-tinted bread. “You just want another pair of gloves.”

 

Maia grins, raising her hands and wiggling her fingers. They’re coated in expensive leather, though the palms of them are already starting to show signs of burning through. “It was practice,” she defends. “For grifting.”

 

Across from them, Codo snorts. He’s grown taller and surlier and meaner. They don’t see as much of him either--sometimes he’s gone for days or weeks at a time. Jyn knows better than to hope for people to come back once they go--already half the people she met the first night in the cadre are gone. Codo’s no exception to this rule.

 

“When are you leaving?” He asks Jyn. He’s fifteen, and already thinks he’s the boss of the younger outfit.

 

“After dinner,” she says. 

 

“Get me a new pair of gloves,” Maia instructs, half-serious.

 

\--

 

The message is exchanged quickly. Jyn doesn’t even know who it is that she’s meeting, or what intel it is that she’s carrying. Just that she’s supposed to meet outside the temple, that there’ll be a beggar waiting there for her to give Saw’s file under the guise of a credit donation. 

 

She has to keep her head down as she walks the streets of Jedha’s Holy City. There’s more and more Stormtroopers appearing, head-to-toe in white that only reminds her of  _ that  _ man. She wants to hit them where Staven told her to (temple, phill-drum, under the back of the skull). Maia had told her she was too much of an open datalog, that her expression wasn’t made for the kind of things  _ Maia  _ could do. Jyn always had too much of a glint in her eyes, a jaw that was just a little too tight or nostrils slightly flared.

 

She approaches the temple, sees someone about Codo’s age sitting on a mat near its entrance. There are hundreds of other beggars, but this mat is a bright red. She walks up to him. 

 

At the time she doesn’t notice his features. But he has brown eyes, with brown hair that’s falling into them. His cheeks have a hollow look to them already, though he can’t be more than sixteen. 

 

“Another lost pilgrim?” Jyn asks, the way Saw told her to.

 

“No pilgrims are lost,” he replies, disinterested.

 

Jyn slides the datachip from her palm, and the beggar lifts up his datapad. She clicks it in, waits for the sound of a beep. Without looking up, without letting him see much of her face, Jyn turns around and starts walking toward the marketplace.

 

She doesn’t know that she’s just given a Rebellion contact a message that will work to permanently dissolve the alliance between them and Saw’s Partisans.

 

\--

 

On the way home, she steals a pair of gloves from a holy woman who looks rich. They’re made of thicker leather, and Jyn thinks they’ll last Maia a little while longer.

 

\--

 

Jyn kills for the first time when she’s thirteen. She doesn’t have to think about it much, just flips the toggle on the grenade like Saw taught her and throws.

 

\--

 

Codo figures out her hiding spot when she’s fourteen. The grotto outside of the catacombs isn’t beautiful by any means--just a muddy hole of water framed by clay banks and near-colorless plants. But she likes to sit there between missions, before Saw needs her to train on something new or Staven needs her to fix one of the detonators she’s miswired.

 

“What are you doing?” He demands, rather than asks. 

 

Jyn pulls her knees in closer to her chest, folds her arms over them. “Nothing.”

 

Codo looks at her, then the water. “Do you not know how to swim?”

 

Jyn glares, a look of pure stubbornness that is always the first response when she can’t do something. “I don’t need to swim in a desert.”

 

“You won’t always be on a desert.”

 

“What do you mean?” Because there isn’t a life outside of Jedha for Jyn. Whenever she thinks of the future, she sees herself here. Doing the same. Fighting for Saw and Maia and the rest of this patchwork family.

 

“Saw sends you out. Once you get old enough.” Codo shrugs off his shirt. There’s a lattice of scar tissue already across his back--ribbons courtesy of shrapnel. “C’mon. I’ll teach you.”

 

Jyn stays on the shoreline, glaring at him with pure mistrust. But Codo only treads the water, and after a half hour of having nothing better to do, Jyn hesitantly joins him. The older boy cracks what might be a smile, were they anyone else in the universe.

 

\--

 

Two weeks after that Maia is dead. Jyn sees it happen. They’re disrupting an Imperial supply chain by sabotaging a miner’s caravan on the outskirts of the Holy City. Whatever it is that they’re hauling, it’s far more protected than any of them expected-- the caravan has an armed detail of about 20 Stormtroopers.

 

Jyn, because she’s still young and reckless, is in the thick of it as soon as their trip-mines go off. She swings her truncheons, striking behind the knees where she can easily reach. Being small works to her advantage--Jyn is all knobby knees and sinew, twisting and ducking and just under the height for which most Imperial soldiers train for kill shots.

 

Maia is just as young, just as reckless. But taller. 

 

Jyn doesn’t know which blaster it is that kills her. All she does is hear a short, puff of air to the right of her-- an exhale cut short. She swings low to the ground and sees Maia’s shocked expression go pale. Her friend topples over wordlessly, and Jyn doesn’t grieve because she’s been trained better than that.

 

In ten minutes they clear the rest of the Stormtroopers. Two hours after that, she and Codo split Maia’s share of synthbread and eat it in silence.

 

\--

 

Three days later, someone steals Maia’s pair of gloves off her while she sleeps. Jyn can only blame herself, for not keeping something valuable tucked away.

 

\--

 

Her birthday passes uneventfully. Saw replaces one of her carbines, a wordless demonstration of his faith in her. Resources and upgrades are rare, Saw wouldn’t squander them for something so sentimental as Jyn turning fifteen.

 

She goes swimming with Codo in the grotto that night. He’s watching her towel-dry her hair with an expression she’s been noticing more and more on him. 

 

“What?” She barks.

 

He glares at her, before picking up his utility belt and storming back into the catacombs.

\--

 

Things start changing a few months later and the arrival of a new member of the cadre. She’s older, probably twenty years on Jyn, and was a defect from an Imperial station Jyn never bothered to learn the name of.

 

“ _ Erso _ ?” She asks once they have the misfortune of meeting. Brows furrowed, lips in a tight line.

 

Staven claps Jyn on the back, laughs that full-belly laugh. “Better not cheat, or she’ll bust your kneecaps!”

 

The members of the cadre gathered around the dejarik board laugh with him, and soon enough the question of her last name seems to be forgotten.

 

Jyn feels eyes on the back of her head, and turns to see Saw standing barely in sight, expression unreadable.

 

\--

 

“Why do you fight?” Saw asks her one night as she nears her sixteenth birthday, the two of the alone as they run maintenance on some of the more expensive weapons. 

 

It’s an odd question, one he’s never asked of her before. Truth be told, she doesn’t think about it. There are things that have needed to be done, and she’s occasionally been the one to do it. 

 

Jyn uses the best oil on Saw’s favorite rifle. “I think about my mother,” she admits. “And the man in white.” The one who ruined it all. Who still chases her.

 

Saw’s next question is guarded. “...and your father?”

 

_ Papa _ . The memory of him is painful, but numbed by whatever it is in Jyn that lets her eat the dinner rations of her only friend. “...he left with the man in white,” is all she says, failing to hide the bitter edge to it. She doesn’t know why the next words make her eyes sting, but they do. “If he’s still alive, he’s a coward.”

 

Saw looks at her with that soft expression again, the one that makes her want to shoot straighter, run faster, fight harder. He smiles before he runs a hand over her hair.

 

\--

 

Her sixteenth birthday comes and goes. Jyn notices that Saw spends more time in the central chamber than usual, that he pays particular attention to whatever the former Imperial woman says.

 

\---

 

They’re celebrating a successful raid the only way they know how. Cheap, home-distilled alcohol is passed around in tin mugs and gambling is in full swing. Jyn is walking to replace one of Staven’s cups when she runs into Codo in one of the darkened halls.

 

He walks close up to her, that strange expression on his face once more. What she hears next isn’t unexpected, but something she wanted to avoid. “Can I kiss you?”

 

Jyn meets his gaze flatly. “No.”

 

She watches his expression quickly pivot from interested to angry, a snarl forming on his lips. Codo doesn’t say anything, just glares at her and returns to the central chamber in angry silence.

 

Jyn senses a hatch closing, but she is always prepared for loss. So only she moves forward, getting Staven a new drink before joining the rest and wearing Codo’s new anger at her like another plate of armor.

 

\--

 

Two weeks pass. Codo’s no longer speaking to her, and the Imperial woman isn’t the only person asking Jyn about her last name.

 

“Got any relatives on Coruscant?” Tiaba asks as she hands out Jyn’s packet of rations, one of her arms now hanging uselessly at her side.

 

“No,” Jyn bites out. 

 

“What were your parents like?” Comes Lasat, a Devronian with only one eye.

 

“Dead,” she replies.

 

“Where were you before this?” Staven asks, the first time he’s ever wondered about it in the eight years she’s known him.

 

Jyn knows it’s important not to give what isn’t bartered for. “Where Saw saved me.”

 

\--

 

It’s the dead of night when Jyn is woken by a hand on her shoulder. In  the cots above her, someone is snoring.

 

“Child,” Saw whispers. 

 

She’s instantly awake. “What is it, Saw?”

 

His face is unreadable. “Follow me.”

 

She does without hesitation.

 

\--

 

He takes her just outside of the Holy City, where the cadre has outposts that are used for raids. Jyn trails after him in silence, eyes drifting the empty, still area that is slowly cast in oranges and pinks from the rising sun.

 

Saw finally stops in front of an empty shell turret, his back to her. Jyn is starkly, suddenly reminded that she doesn’t like caves.

 

“Jyn…” he breathes out. She doesn’t know this tone, has never heard him use it before.

 

“What’s wrong?” 

 

Saw looks at the shell turret for a long time. In his hands is a blaster and a knife.

 

Feeling a rush of bravery, of fool-hardiness, Jyn reaches out and grabs the sleeve of his arm. “Saw?” She asks again.

 

His shoulders slump, and slowly, Saw turns from the turret. His face, if she was feeling sentimental, looks almost haunted by something.

 

After a moment, he hands her the blaster and slides the knife into her holster. Then he says the words that will change her life.

 

“Jyn...I. Have work for you to do off Jedha.” His eyes are dark, assessing. “Are you willing to go?”

 

She nods. There is very little she isn’t willing to do for Saw Gerrera. 

 

He takes a deep breath. And his hand runs over the top of her hair for what feels like the last time.

**Author's Note:**

> There's going to be a time skip between this prologue and the story proper, just fyi!


End file.
